A Reuters report entitled "U.S. protests shrink while antiwar sentiment grows" has pointed out a problem that observers have been watching since the war on Iraq was launched in 2003.

From hundreds of thousands of protesters in the run-up to the war, ongoing control of the antiwar movement by Marxoid sects has sidelined open support for an Iraq withdrawal. This despite the fact that antiwar sentiment is now held by 58% of the US population, up from a mere 23% in 2003. The latest demonstration brought out a pathetic showing of less than a thousand people in Washington, DC.

Such protests have become circus-like roadshows of politically correct mania, mixing calls for "anti-racism," "gay rights" and amnesty for illegal aliens in with the antiwar message. The largest officially-"antiwar" group is the Act Now to Stop War & End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition, and as the name suggests it is tailor made to alienate the white middle class who have the social power collectively to force an end to the war. Instead, almost as if they are playing off neo-con cue cards, ANSWER and various other hangers-on have led the movement into a cul de sac.

ANSWER was founded as a front group for the Workers World Party, a long-established, tiny sect with, like the neo-conservatives, roots in Trotskyism. Considering their antiwar pose, it's a fact that they cheered the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and supported the Kremlin when it rolled tanks into Czechoslvakia to crush the Prague Spring in 1968. And while they are against the US war to dislodge the Taliban in Afghanistan, they favored the Soviet invasion of 1979. Even more politically correct than many of its leftist opponents, the WWP is infamous for an especially anti-white hard line. Its own internal affirmative action policies led a Latina who had been built up as a WWP leader to take her influence and supposed skills seriously, taking the bulk of the WWP -- and the ANSWER Coalition -- into a new grouplet, the Party for Socialism and Liberation. The WWP and PSL now hold rival antiwar events, much to the bemusement and disgust of genuine antiwar activists and the ordinary people who pay the price of the war.

The aim of these organizations in making a serious political issue into a joke is to recruit new members based on a Marxist vision of how to build a movement. They don't care about actually ending the war -- after all, leftism suffered a huge defeat in America when Nixon pulled out of Vietnam. In this sense the far left and the neo-con right are allies: the left gets to imagine that it is relevant while the neocons get a paper opposition.

What these leftists care about is using the antiwar movement to piggyback their own delusional ideology and America suffers.